The military needs what goes up to come down without the global positioning system.

Military cargo-drops to places like forward operating bases in Afghanistan need to go off perfectly. When they don’t, soliders have to expose themselves to dangerous fire to retrieve the package that missed its target. But there are a lot of things that can get in the way of a precision drop. Increasingly, that includes insecurities in the global position system.

The Army is testing a new joint precision airdrop system, or JPADS. The ultimate goal is a system that can be fitted to cargo that the military can drop from 25,000 feet and from as far away as 20 miles to a specified location, all without GPS. So far, the Army has tested the new JPADS at 10,000 feet in Arizona and they’re planning on tests at higher ranges to confirm that it will work as expected.

The system uses an aerial guidance unit, or AGU: essentially, a box containing a set of motors that manipulate and steer the parafoil, and a computer. A camera sits underneath.

Defense contractor Draper makes the software on the unit, which uses data from the camera to understand where it is and manipulate the parachute to go where it wants to go.

Subscribe

Receive daily email updates:

Subscribe to the Defense One daily.

Be the first to receive updates.

“The payloads were dropped from planes, and then JPADS immediately determined their own location by comparing terrain features spotted using optical sensors with commercial satellite imagery of the area,” Draper said in a press release.

“We’re programming a computer to do what we all do on a daily basis. A lot of us navigate by image recognition. If I’m driving home and I recognize the blue house, I know where I am relative to my destination because I’m familiar with what it looks like and can distinguish it from other blue houses,” said Chris Bessette, head of the JPADS program at Draper.

The newest capability — determining position without any GPS — has been in development for about nine months, but Draper has been working on vision-based navigation for about three years. “The challenge is both getting algorithms to run fast enough and being able to handle large uncertainty in your initial guess at vehicle state,” said Bessette.

The Army began developing the GPS-reliant JPADS program in 1993 and dropping them out of C-130s in Afghanistan in 2006.

The testing of a GPS-free version of JPADS is yet another example of efforts to develop alternatives to satellite guidance. “GPS is very expensive to launch and operate,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said during an April 24 podcast from Silicon Valley, according to National Defense magazine. The global positioning system, he said, “makes us vulnerable to attacks, it is impossible to use in the valleys of Afghanistan or in a big city [where signals are blocked], or in places where the signal is poor.”

“At DoD, we worry about enemies jamming GPS signals.” Army Maj. Christopher Brown, who helps run the service’s efforts in position, navigation and timing, or PNT, toldC4ISR& Networks last year. “Threats to military GPS have evolved and improved at a rapid pace — from a proliferation of small-scale commercial jamming devices that can readily be purchased on eBay to large-scale military anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is working on a variety of PNT efforts to free the military from its reliance on increasingly insecure location signals and expensive satellites. They’re working on new tech that uses everything from pulsed lasers to atomic clocks.

Once it proves its ability to escort military cargo safely to the ground, Bessette believes, Draper’s JPAD tech could find its way into self-driving cars and other aerospace applications.

“For example, drones will likely leverage the technology once it matures,” he said.

Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, The ...
Full bio

By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or
otherwise objectionable. Although Defenseone.com does not monitor comments posted to this site (and
has no obligation to), it reserves the right to delete, edit, or move any material that it deems
to be in violation of this rule.

Thank you for subscribing to newsletters from DefenseOne.com.
We think these reports might interest you:

Federal IT Applications: Assessing Government's Core Drivers

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

Federal organizations rely on state-of-the-art IT tools and systems to deliver services efficiently and
effectively, and it takes a vast ecosystem of organizations, individuals, information, and resources to successfully deliver these products. This issue brief discusses the current threats to the vulnerable supply chain - and how agencies can prevent these threats to produce a more secure IT supply chain process.

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.